Pretty much already asked the question, but let me explain what I'm thinking of. We have a windows 2003 Standard server, with the latest updates and so loaded onto it. It's of course plugged into an iSCSI san that serves as the primary company file server. It also provides network storage for our Mac users, and I've ExtremeZ-IP handling their shares (works great).

Now for the question. We experience occasional issues (slow downs and so on), and I'm partially convinced that at least some of the issue lies with the idea that a Win 2003 standard system isn't built for this kind of abuse. Perfmon seems to bear this out, as it ends up getting very busy. What I'm trying to determine is two things: 1) would there be any kind of benefit to moving towards 2003 storage server, and 2) is there a direct upgrade path, or would be a new build. I've gotten this thing tuned up as much as it will go, and while that helped a lot, I'm sure there's more taht can be done.

You said that perfmon is showing some bottlenecks, where would these be? From the sounds of it, I am going to guess that your issue is with the iSCSI SAN. iSCSI is a tiny, tiny pipe for filesystem access - miniscule compared to locally attached drives. For a fileserver to have iSCSI backing unless you are running Infiniband or 10GigE is going to me a massive problem. Also, is your iSCSI connected over a dedicated storage network or is it sharing your pipe that is used for the CIFS access?

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I don't think you'll see much bang for you buck. I've used WSS on at a couple of other places, and it's nice, but file sharing requires a surprising amount of horsepower.

You'll probably get as much bang out of going to 64bit as going to WSS (which is also 64bit).

As for upgrading, no there is no upgrade path. You also cannot purchase WSS from Microsoft either, you can only get WSS as part of special OEM equipment (so you'll have to buy a particular server from Dell, HP, etc).

Windows Storage Server is listed as being "optimized for file serving" but I think that you will find that there is nothing unique to it other than some very basic tuning items - which you have probably already covered. Just like any NAS system, basic tuning of a normal file server will generally provide the best performance. Standard OSs running as dedicated file servers are the most powerful file servers over NAS devices, so you are on the right path with your existing OS.

The biggest obstacle that you will face is that Storage Server is not a product that you can buy. It is an OS that can only be shipped by an OEM on a NAS device. It is not an OS for IT shops to get their hands on. It's only real purpose is to make appliances rather than general purpose servers.

You said that perfmon is showing some bottlenecks, where would these be? From the sounds of it, I am going to guess that your issue is with the iSCSI SAN. iSCSI is a tiny, tiny pipe for filesystem access - miniscule compared to locally attached drives. For a fileserver to have iSCSI backing unless you are running Infiniband or 10GigE is going to me a massive problem. Also, is your iSCSI connected over a dedicated storage network or is it sharing your pipe that is used for the CIFS access?

Will local drives not suffice? Fiber Channel or a major IP pipe for iSCSI if you go with SAN. I am a big opponent of SAN backed NAS (file servers), it adds a lot of cost and performance penalties without any real benefits. Fileservers can handle their own syncs so SAN isn't part of a redundancy scenario so the overhead is all loss except in extreme circumstances.

Windows Server 2008 R2 should be an improvement. Doing that with local drives could be all that you need. I really like OpenSolaris with ZFS2 as a dedicated file serving system. We use OpenFiler as well.